a month ago
- SwiftII is a Swift-like mini development environment for the Apple II, inspired by Apple Pascal's bytecode approach.
- The project targets original Apple II hardware with constraints like 40,704 bytes of main RAM and uses a bytecode VM instead of native 6502 code.
- It features a REPL, file browser, text editor, and compiler, with support for digraph input on pre-IIe keyboards due to character limitations.
- Memory banking (e.g., Saturn 128K or IIe aux RAM) allows expanded features and larger programs, but requires separate disk images for different hardware.
- Development relied heavily on AI assistance (Claude and Codex) over 18 phases, with design documents to manage context and decisions.